Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker participated in a "criminal scheme" to coordinate fundraising for the Republican in response to efforts to recall him and state senators from office, local prosecutors argue in court documents released Thursday.

Walker, his chief of staff and others were involved in the coordination effort with "a number of national groups and prominent figures," including Karl Rove, says special prosecutor Francis Schmitz.

"[T]he evidence shows an extensive coordination scheme that pervaded nearly every aspect of the campaign activities during the historic 2011 and 2012 Wisconsin Senate and Gubernatorial recall elections," Schmitz wrote in a December motion, on behalf of five attorneys from some of the state's most liberal counties, just now unsealed by an appellate court judge.

Even worse for a governor who has already had to try an explain away highly controversial emails from former aides, as well as the investigations, prosecutions and convictions of aides, appointees, allies and campaign donors, are the actual details of the documents that were ordered unsealed by Federal Appeals Judge Frank Easterbrook.

The May 4, 2011, e-mail to Rove read: "Bottom-line: R.J. helps keep in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin. We are running 9 recall elections and it will be like 9 congressional markets in every market in the state (and Twin Cities)."

Walker, who is certainly no stranger to controversy, claimed Thursday that he had been vindicated by judges who have restricted-and even attempted to shut down-the "John Doe" investigation into political wrongdoing. But other judges have sustained the inquiry.

Walker allies argue that he is the victim of a "witch hunt" organized by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and other top prosecutors, who they allege are out to silence conservatives and harm Republicans. Chisholm is a Democrat, but he is also a respected prosecutor who has gone after Democrats and worked with Republicans.

Lawyers for targets of the probe are fighting to shut it down and, in this unsettled and uncertain post-Citizens United period with regard to state and national campaign finance laws, they believe they will succeed.

Attempts to halt the probe, which have been cheered on by advocates for a no-holds-barred "big money" politics, are part of a broader strategy to gut remaining campaign-finance laws. One way to super-charge the influence of major donors and corporate interests is to undermine bans on coordination between candidates and their campaigns with "independent" groups that operate under different and more flexible rules for raising and spending money during a campaign.

"If you don't have restrictions on coordination, then the contribution limits become meaningless," Paul S. Ryan, the senior counsel for the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, explained. Ryan told Politico that without the restrictions, a donor "could max out under the limits [for donating to a candidate], but then you could also just say to the candidates, 'Hey give me an ad script and we'll walk down to the TV station and do this ad for you.'"

But even if the probe is prevented from going forward, the documents that have now been released-in combination with the February release of 27,000 pages of e-mails from the seized from the "secret e-mail system" computers of a former Walker aide who has been convicted of political wrongdoing-paint a picture of a governor whose political style does not say "statesman."

There is no question that Walker is a hero to some Republicans, and to some conservatives.

But Republicans and conservatives who want to win back the White House have to be realistic enough to recognize that Walker has a paper trail that is unlikely to read well on the 2016 campaign trail.

The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War.

The language of violence engenders violence. The language of hate engenders hate. "I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn," W.H. Auden wrote. "Those to whom evil is done do evil in return." It is as old as the Bible.

There is no fight left in us. The war is over. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country. It will never be put back together. We are reduced-in what must be an act of divine justice decreed by the gods, whom we have discovered to our dismay are Islamic-to pleading with Iran for military assistance to shield the corrupt and despised U.S. protectorate led by Nouri al-Maliki. We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.

We should have heeded, while we had a chance, the wails of mothers and fathers. We should have listened to the cries of the wounded. We should have wept over the bodies of Iraqi children lined up in neat rows in the morgues. We should have honored grief so we could honor life. But the dance of death is intoxicating. Once it begins you whirl in an ecstatic frenzy. Death's embrace, which feels at first like sexual lust, tightens and tightens until you suffocate. Now the music has stopped. All we have left are loss and pain.

And where are the voices of sanity? Why are the cheerleaders of slaughter, who have been wrong about Iraq since before the invasion, still urging us toward ruin? Why are those who destabilized Iraq and the region in the worst strategic blunder in American history still given a hearing? Why do we listen to simpletons and morons?

They bang their fists. They yell. They throw tantrums. They demand that the world conform to their childish vision. It is as if they have learned nothing from the 11 years of useless slaughter. As if they can dominate that which they never had the power to dominate.

I sat in a restaurant Thursday in Boston's Kenmore Square with military historian Andrew Bacevich. You won't hear his voice much on the airwaves. He is an apostate. He speaks of the world as it is, not the self-delusional world our empire builders expect it to be. He knows war with a painful intimacy, not only as a Vietnam combat veteran and a retired Army colonel but also as the father of a U.S. Army officer killed in a 2007 suicide bombing in Iraq.

"In the 1990s there was a considerable effort made in the military, but also in the larger community of national security experts scratching their heads and [asking] what are the implications of all this technology," he said. "They conceived of something called the Revolution in Military Affairs-RMA. If you believed in the Revolution of Military Affairs you knew that nothing could stop the United States military when it engaged in a conflict. Victory was, for all practical purposes, a certainty. People like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and I expect Dick Cheney also, bought this hook, line and sinker. You put yourself in their shoes in the wake of 9/11. An attack comes out of Afghanistan, a country frankly nobody cares about, and you conceive of this grand strategy of trying to transform the Islamic world. Where are we going to start? We are going to start by attacking a country [Iraq]-we had it under surveillance and sanctions for the past decade-where there is a bona fide bad guy to make a moral case and where we are confident we can make short work of this adversary, a further demonstration that the American military cannot be stopped. They utterly and totally miscalculated. Iraq is falling apart. And many of these people, either in government or outside of government, who were proponents of the war are now advocating for a resumption of the American war. Not one of them is willing to acknowledge the extent of that military miscalculation. Once you acknowledge it, then the whole project of militarizing U.S. policy towards the Greater Middle East collapses."

Bacevich blames the concentration of power into the hands of the executive branch for the debacle. He said that since the Kennedy administration "the incoming president and his team, it does not matter which party, see the permanent government as a problem. If we [the new officials] are going to get done what we want to get done we have to find ways to marginalize the permanent government. This has led to the centralization of authority in the White House and means decisions are made by a very small number of people. The consultation becomes increasingly informal, to the point it is not even documented."

"I do not think we even know when the decision to go to war with Iraq was actually made," Bacevich said. "There is no documented meeting where [President George W.] Bush sat down with how many people-six, 10, 25-and said, 'Let's vote.' The decision kind of emerged and therefore was implemented. Why would you operate that way? You would operate that way if you viewed the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the CIA and the State Department as, in a sense, the enemy."

"The invasion of Iraq was intended to be a catalyst," he said. "It was supposed to be the catalyst that would enable us ... to change the region. It turned out to be the catalyst that resulted in destabilization. The big question of the moment is not what can we do or is there anything we can do to salvage Iraq. The question is to what degree have our actions resulted in this larger regional mayhem. And to the extent they have, isn't it time to rethink fundamentally our expectations of what American power, and particularly American military power, can achieve?"

"We need to take a radically different course," Bacevich said. "There is an analogy to be made with Great Britain in the wake of World War I. It was in World War I that Britain and France collaborated to dismantle the Ottoman Empire to create the new Middle East. While on the one hand there was an awareness that Britain was in decline, at the level where policy was made there was not a willingness to consider the implications of that fact. It took World War II to drive it home-that the [British] empire was doomed. I think that is where we are."

Out of this decline, Bacevich said, is emerging a multipolar order. The United States will no longer be able to operate as an unchallenged superpower. But, he said, similar to the condition that existed as the British Empire took its last gasps, "there is very little willingness in Washington or in policy circles to take on board the implications multipolarity would call for in terms of adjusting our policy."

The inability to adjust to our declining power means that the United States will continue to squander its resources, its money and its military.

"By squandering power we forfeit our influence because we look stupid and we bankrupt ourselves," Bacevich said. "We will spend $4 trillion, not dollars spent in the moment but dollars we will have spent the last time the last Afghanistan veteran gets his last VA check. That money is gone forever. It is concealed because in the Bush administration's confidence that victory would be easily won the government did not bother to mobilize the country or increase our taxes. We weaken ourselves economically. People complain about our crappy infrastructure. Give me $4 trillion and I probably could have fixed a couple of bridges. And we must never forget the human cost. Lives lost, lives damaged. And in these two wars [Afghanistan and Iraq] there does seem to be this increase in PTSD that we don't know what to do about. It is a squandering of human capital."

Bacevich said the "military mind-set" has so infected the discourse of the power elite that when there is a foreign policy problem the usual response is to discuss "three different courses of military action. ... Should it be airstrikes with drones? Should it be airstrikes with manned aircraft? Special operations forces? Or some combination of all three? And that's what you get." The press, he said, is an "echo chamber and reinforces the notion that those are the [only] options."

According to CNBC's Eamon Javers, "Cybercriminals acting in late 2013 installed a malicious computer program on the servers of a large hedge fund, crippling its high-speed trading strategy and sending information about its trades to unknown offsite computers." Ultimately, Javers reports that "the malware represented a multimillion dollar problem for the hedge fund" and "the intruders were able to reap significant profits."

Contextualizing the previously undisclosed episode, Javers says "The new wave of attacks includes other assaults on hedge funds seemingly designed to uncover their trading strategies, and implies the existence of cybercriminals with the technical savvy to attack highly secure computer networks and, at the same time, the financial and market savvy to replicate intricate high-speed trading strategies."

If this kind of thing was happening to a traditional bank, consumers would have less to worry about, because they would know their deposits are at least backed up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But when it comes to most hedge funds, there is no such federal backstop. As Ameriprise Financial's website puts it in its discussion about hedge funds, "Investment products are not federally or FDIC-insured, are not deposits or obligations of, or guaranteed by any financial institution, and involve investment risks including possible loss of principal and fluctuation in value."

In other words, save for a few exceptions, if your money gets stolen from your hedge fund manager, there's usually no government-guaranteed insurance for you.

Now sure, it's easy to think there's no need for regular old average consumers to worry about cyber criminals stealing from hedge funds. After all, hedge fund managers are some of the richest people in the world, and their individual clients are at the top of the overall income and wealth scale themselves. Indeed, Securities and Exchange Commission rules do not allow individuals to invest in hedge funds unless they prove that they have a net worth "that exceeds $1 million... income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year."

However, all of that should be false comfort to the average income earner because while those SEC guidelines are about individual investors, they are not about institutional investors - many of which manage average individuals' money. As just one example, state and local governments are institutional investors that, by one estimate, now have $115 billion worth of taxpayer funds in hedge funds.

The point here is that because the American has become so financialized, there's no escape from the financial sector. It touches so many parts of the economy that a cybercime threat against it poses risks way beyond the office towers on Wall Street - risks that, again, are not insured against by an agency like the FDIC.

Because of this systemic risk, the SEC recently announced it "will be conducting examinations of more than 50 registered broker-dealers and registered investment advisers, focusing on areas related to cybersecurity." Reuters earlier reported that "Inspections are designed to catch major problems before they bubble up; however, exams can also lead to enforcement action if the SEC uncovers egregious activity or repeat violations."

No doubt, the exams and the fears stoked by this week's news from CNBC may end up resulting in a serious business opportunity for the cybersecurity industry, as Wall Street firms frantically try to bulk up their defenses.

On Sunday Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary and a lifelong Republican, had an Op-Ed article about climate policy in The New York Times. In the article, he declared that man-made climate change is "the challenge of our time, and called for a national tax on carbon emissions to encourage conservation and the adoption of green technologies. Considering the prevalence of climate denial within today's G.O.P., and the absolute opposition to any kind of tax increase, this was a brave stand to take.

But not nearly brave enough. Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax. But that isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. A carbon tax may be the best thing we could do, but we won't actually do it.

Yet there are a number of second-best things (in the technical sense, as I'll explain shortly) that we're either doing already or might do soon. And the question for Mr. Paulson and other conservatives who consider themselves environmentalists is whether they're willing to accept second-best answers, and in particular whether they're willing to accept second-best answers implemented by the other party. If they aren't, their supposed environmentalism is an empty gesture.

Let me give some examples of what I'm talking about.

First, consider rules like fuel efficiency standards, or "net metering" mandates requiring that utilities buy back the electricity generated by homeowners' solar panels. Any economics student can tell you that such rules are inefficient compared with the clean incentives provided by an emissions tax. But we don't have an emissions tax, and fuel efficiency rules and net metering reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So a question for conservative environmentalists: Do you support the continuation of such mandates, or are you with the business groups (spearheaded by the Koch brothers) campaigning to eliminate them and impose fees on home solar installations?

Second, consider government support for clean energy via subsidies and loan guarantees. Again, if we had an appropriately high emissions tax such support might not be necessary (there would be a case for investment promotion even then, but never mind). But we don't have such a tax. So the question is, Are you O.K. with things like loan guarantees for solar plants, even though we know that some loans will go bad, Solyndra-style?

Finally, what about the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal that it use its regulatory authority to impose large reductions in emissions from power plants? The agency is eager to pursue market-friendly solutions to the extent it can - basically by imposing emissions limits on states, while encouraging states or groups of states to create cap-and-trade systems that effectively put a price on carbon. But this will nonetheless be a partial approach that addresses only one source of greenhouse gas emissions. Are you willing to support this partial approach?

By the way: Readers well versed in economics will recognize that I'm talking about what is technically known as the "theory of the second best." According to this theory, distortions in one market - in this case, the fact that there are large social costs to carbon emissions, but individuals and firms don't pay a price for emitting carbon - can justify government intervention in other, related markets. Second-best arguments have a dubious reputation in economics, because the right policy is always to eliminate the primary distortion, if you can. But sometimes you can't, and this is one of those times.

Which brings me back to Mr. Paulson. In his Op-Ed he likens the climate crisis to the financial crisis he helped confront in 2008. Unfortunately, it's not a very good analogy: In the financial crisis he could credibly argue that disaster was only days away, while the climate catastrophe will unfold over many decades.

So let me suggest a different analogy, one that he probably won't like. In policy terms, climate action - if it happens at all - will probably look like health reform. That is, it will be an awkward compromise dictated in part by the need to appease special interests, not the clean, simple solution you would have implemented if you could have started from scratch. It will be the subject of intense partisanship, relying overwhelmingly on support from just one party, and will be the subject of constant, hysterical attacks. And it will, if we're lucky, nonetheless do the job.

Did I mention that health reform is clearly working, despite its flaws?

The question for Mr. Paulson and those of similar views is whether they're willing to go along with that kind of imperfection. If they are, welcome aboard.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The classified files, revealed today by the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information in a reporting collaboration with The Intercept, shed light on how the NSA's surveillance of global communications has expanded under a clandestine program, known as RAMPART-A, that depends on the participation of a growing network of intelligence agencies.

It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as "third-party partners," are playing an increasingly important role -by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables.

The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners "provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment." This allows the agency to covertly tap into "congestion points around the world" where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.

The program, which the secret files show cost U.S. taxpayers about $170 million between 2011 and 2013, sweeps up a vast amount of communications at lightning speed. According to the intelligence community's classified "Black Budget" for 2013, RAMPART-A enables the NSA to tap into three terabits of data every second as the data flows across the compromised cables -the equivalent of being able to download about 5,400 uncompressed high-definition movies every minute.

In an emailed statement, the NSA declined to comment on the RAMPART-A program. "The fact that the U.S. government works with other nations, under specific and regulated conditions, mutually strengthens the security of all," said NSA spokeswoman Vanee' Vines. "NSA's efforts are focused on ensuring the protection of the national security of the United States, its citizens, and our allies through the pursuit of valid foreign intelligence targets only."

The secret documents reveal that the NSA has set up at least 13 RAMPART-A sites, nine of which were active in 2013. Three of the largest -codenamed AZUREPHOENIX, SPINNERET and MOONLIGHTPATH -mine data from some 70 different cables or networks. The precise geographic locations of the sites and the countries cooperating with the program are among the most carefully guarded of the NSA's secrets, and these details are not contained in the Snowden files. However, the documents point towards some of the countries involved -Denmark and Germany among them.

An NSA memo prepared for a 2012 meeting between the then-NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, and his Danish counterpart noted that the NSA had a longstanding partnership with the country's intelligence service on a special "cable access" program. Another document, dated from 2013 and first published by Der Spiegel on Wednesday, describes a German cable access point under a program that was operated by the NSA, the German intelligence service BND, and an unnamed third partner.

The Danish and German operations appear to be associated with RAMPART-A because it is the only NSA cable-access initiative that depends on the cooperation of third-party partners. Other NSA operations tap cables without the consent or knowledge of the countries that host the cables, or are operated from within the United States with the assistance of American telecommunications companies that have international links. One secret NSA document notes that most of the RAMPART-A projects are operated by the partners "under the cover of an overt comsat effort," suggesting that the tapping of the fiber-optic cables takes place at Cold War-era eavesdropping stations in the host countries, usually identifiable by their large white satellite dishes and radomes.

A shortlist of other countries potentially involved in the RAMPART-A operation is contained in the Snowden archive. A classified presentation dated 2013, published recently in Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald's book No Place To Hide, revealed that the NSA had top-secret spying agreements with 33 third-party countries, including Denmark, Germany, and 15 other European Union member states:

For any foreign government, allowing the NSA to secretly tap private communications is politically explosive, hence the extreme secrecy shrouding the names of those involved. But governments that participate in RAMPART-A get something in return: access to the NSA's sophisticated surveillance equipment, so they too can spy on the mass of data that flows in and out of their territory.

The partnership deals operate on the condition that the host country will not use the NSA's spy technology to collect any data on U.S. citizens. The NSA also agrees that it will not use the access it has been granted to collect data on the host countries' citizens. One NSA document notes that "there ARE exceptions" to this rule -though does not state what those exceptions may be.

According to Snowden, the agreements that the NSA has in place with its partners are lax and easily circumvented. In a statement to the European parliament in March, he used Denmark and Germany as examples to describe how the NSA had effectively established what he called a "European bazaar" for surveillance.

"An EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn't search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn't search for Germans," Snowden said.

"Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements."

_____

When I was about 7 years old, I eagerly bit into a piece of freshly cut, raw sugar cane, that had just been harvested from my great-grandmother's garden. As the cold, sickly sweet juices gathered in my mouth, tasting very little like what I associated with sugar, I vowed never to taste such a thing again. This is one vow, after all these years, I have managed to keep.

This being my most memorable encounter with the raw product of sugar, I wasn't prepared fully to step into the Domino Sugar Factory recently to see Kara Walker's latest exhibit. "On Subtlety" (for short) features as its centerpiece a gigantic white sugar sculpture known as the Mammy Sphinx. After walking through all the figures of little worker boys, coated in sticky molasses, toting baskets nearly half their size, you encounter the massive and majestic white sculpture at a distance, surrounded by all of us and our gawking eyes. I appreciated that there was time and space for an approach, that there was time to make space for my own trepidation. Having studied a bit of Kara Walker's art in graduate school, I knew her work would be jarring, imposing, non-subtle, gratuitous and provocative. That is the point, I guess.

As my homegirl and I gingerly approached first the front of her, then her left flank, then her backside, then finally her right flank, taking in her massive whiteness, I felt oddly - cared for.

Looking at her stout thighs, her round posterior, and her sturdy feet, parts of her body felt familiar to me, like the bodies of so many thick, round, healthy (as we colloquially refer to these thick sanguine bodies back home) women I know. Those women grew sugar cane, and corn, and potatoes, tilled land, shelled bushels of peas, birthed generations, and made a headscarf look like a crown. She reminded me of all of those women who are a part of me and, thus, of myself.

I know there is a risk in making such connections, especially with this body type that conjures up what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as the "controlling image" of the Mammy. I know the risk, of associating my own body with the asexual, overly maternal black woman, whose compulsory labor and coerced affection for white children, far too many white folks romanticize.

But our affective relationships with art are intrinsically complicated. I will allow myself that grace even as I can't quite bring myself to grant it to the man who made his female companion take a picture of him as he posed with his hand, flatly in the air, pointing in the direction of the sphinx's rear. Taken at a certain scale, the picture most assuredly will look like his hand is planted firmly on her ass.

This is how it feels ... to be a problem ... to experience this kind of art, which is so deeply about race and class, among the likes of people who share a very different history with such bodies than you do.

Standing there talking with my friend, a Brooklynite, processing all the emotions the Sphinx conjured, including the slight discomfort of encountering her in a factory with these many throngs of non-black people, our conversation inevitably turned, as so many think pieces about the sculpture have done, to gentrification. How do you enjoy this art when stats would probably bear out that many of these Brooklyn newcomers live in places previously populated by black families that have now been priced out of the neighborhood? What happens when people are far more comfortable going to see relics of you - trace evidence of your presence - in a makeshift museum, than figuring out how to live in an unimperialist fashion among you?

Last week, Matthew Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, wrote about the epidemic levels of eviction for poor black women. Not only do these women make lower wages than their black male working-class counterparts, but they often have children, which makes them more vulnerable to eviction. Once women are evicted then it becomes even harder for them to find housing. So Desmond concludes that while poor black men are "locked up," poor black women are "locked out." Even as other critics have discussed the politics of "dirty sugar" that shape the existence of the Domino Sugar Factory and talked about how its imminent destruction to make way for high-rise condos on the waterfront, very few of them have seemed able to really center a black women's body and labor within the space of this conversation. Bringing much needed diasporic and non-U.S. centric points of view to the table, many of these pieces still fail to really grapple with this simulacrum of a black woman's body, the materiality not only of the sculpture, but the material displacements that black women experience every day in places like Brooklyn.

Evictions of sisters in my milieu are whispered, shameful experiences, better to be gotten through and gotten over, then forgotten about. But they are happening in these places built by the labor not just of black people but of black women. This history of imminent displacement seems incredibly difficult for black women to shake, especially when our bodies remain tethered to controlling images that will not turn us loose.

One of the most striking things about the Sphinx is that she lies there on her haunches, rooted in place, demanding that we all reckon with what she means, together, despite our separateness. Colorlines reports that a group of black women organized on Facebook to come see the exhibit after being disturbed by the paucity of black people coming to see the Sphinx. Nick Powers, a professor at SUNY Westbury, attending as part of the group, challenged those who stood behind the sculpture for taking offensive photos of her vulva. I am glad this group disturbed the peace, making it clear that despite the sugary refined whiteness of the Sphinx, nothing about the lives of the women she represents, the indignities they endured, their bodies on display, their lives invisible, their labor summarily exploited and outsourced to build the wealth of white people, was remotely idyllic.

During the process of carving the Sphinx, Kara Walker made a collage as part of her inspiration for the structure of the sculpture. The collage, which can be seen here, is a the picture of a scantily clad black woman, perhaps a video vixen lying on her haunches, ass out, adorned with lingerie. The head of the woman has been ripped off or covered over and replaced with an image of the Sphinx.

The Mammy Sphinx blends high and low art, reminding us, as proselytizing Afrocentric types are wont to do, of both the supposedly lofty Egyptian ancestral heritage from which we (the undifferentiated mass of diasporic Africans) hail and the supposedly low depths to which we (African-American women who allegedly don't know our history) have succumbed, pulled there mostly by our willingness to muck around in cultural quicksand. Kara Walker reminds us that black women's bodies are not reducible to these narratives, for our bodies experience pain, and pleasure, and possibility. We are people with history, but also agency.

I hold in tension the body of the actual woman that Walker used to shape the Sphinx with my own impression of the slightly protruding vulva that punctuates the back of the sculpture. The pictures made it seem both grotesque and gratuitous. But seeing it in person, it felt like just a vulva, a body part that every female-bodied person has. For a black woman's vulva to feel like just a vulva, when it can never in the context of American imperialism be only that, shows that this piece has something for all who encounter it. The Sugar Sphinx's vulva looked regular not mythical, conjuring and simultaneously refusing a reading of the figure as Saartjie Bartmann. Her body had some of the makings of a classic nude sculpture, granted to a body type never considered to be either classy or respectable.

Dear propoganda ansager Kinsley,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your attacks on the first amendment and the journalists who use it, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 07-05-2014. We salute you Herr Kinsley, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Biden